Akka review: Keerthy Suresh-Radhika Apte’s glossy Gangs of Kantarapura lacks true grit
The Indian Express · Shubhra Gupta ·
Akka review: Keerthy Suresh and Radhika Apte headline Gangs of Kantarapura, a glossy period drama that promises grit but falls short of delivering it.
Akka review: Feisty female gangsters, matrilineal linkages, picturesque period settings, strong women leading from the front: can anything be better?
Turns out, not really. When it’s a Yashraj production, style is a given, and there’s plenty of that strewn around the strikingly shot Akka, with its sprawling homesteads and old rivalries and new contenders. What there’s not in such lush abundance, is substance: the plot, which takes its time getting to a tipping point by the fifth episode, at which point there’s a pause till presumably the second part of the show, that keeps giving way to gratuitous spurts of violence and superfluous stylistic flourishes.
The timelines flashes back and forth 800 years in the past and the 1980s, as we are led into fictional Pernuru, somewhere in South India, where women rule, with a set of stringent rules that they have created. They are allowed to take lovers, but not husbands; girl children are worshipped as are the kul-devis, which watch over the forests and lakes and the people. Rough justice is the name of the game, and there’s no fury than a woman scorned.
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